Historical Time, Social Determination of Health and Epidemics: Dialectical Intersections between History and Public Health in the Long Term

• Grant number: 25/10348-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health - Public Health
• Principal Investigator: Marco Akerman
• Grantee: Anna Cristina Rodopiano de Carvalho Ribeiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Saúde Pública (FSP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The global epidemiological challenge caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and unfolding in multiple and interdependent crises continues to demand responses from Health that are committed to the confluence of contemporary historical, social, political, economic, ecological and cultural processes. Thus, this research proposes an intersection between the fields of History and Public Health, through the dialectical encounter of the durations of time in History and the intersections of the general-particular-singular present in the Social Determination of Health. The aim is to build a theoretical-methodological framework based on this intersection and to investigate the orphanhood caused by the Spanish Flu, between 1918-1919, and by Covid-19, between 2020-2021, in São Paulo-capital, to apprehend ruptures and continuities in social inequities resulting from epidemics and expressed by the Social Determination of Health in the long term. In order for dialectics to be privileged throughout the analytical path, the study will adopt Corporeality as a singular dimension, where the body, mediated by the temporal experience of individuals and collectives and understood historically, will allow the recovery of indelible marks of illness in human experience and collective memory. It is expected to contribute to the articulation and exploration of new epistemological approaches that highlight dynamics and mechanisms of reality present in epidemic events in the social production of health, so that such complexification can provide contributions and horizons for investigations and present and future confrontations of inequalities. (AU)